Max Weber (artist)

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Max Weber in 1914

Max Weber (April 18, 1881 – October 4, 1961) was a

Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman.[2]

Biography

Early years

Summer, 1909, oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 23 7/8 in. (102.2 x 60.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born in the Polish city of Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an "enlightened and vital teacher" in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of Japanese art, and defended the advanced modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the Armory Show in New York in 1913.[3]

In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the

modernists as Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend), Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other members of the School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as Abraham Walkowitz, H. Lyman Sayen, and Patrick Henry Bruce.[5] Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent Gertrude Stein's salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse's private "Academie." Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau's first exhibition in the United States.[6]

America

In 1909 he returned to New York and helped to introduce

James Gibbons Huneker, protested that the artist's clever technique had left viewers with no real picture and made use of the adage, "The operation was successful, but the patient died."[8] As art historian Sam Hunter wrote, "Weber's wistful, tentative Cubism provided the philistine press with their first solid target prior to the Armory Show."[9]

The Cellist, 1917, which was featured in Weber's 1930 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art[10]

Weber was sustained by the respect of some eminent peers, such as photographers

Art Students League, where he taught from 1919 to 1921 and 1926 to 1927.[12][13] Weber died in Great Neck, New York in 1961. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum
in 1982.

Weber evidently was a prickly personality even with his allies. He and Stieglitz had a falling-out, and Weber was not represented in the famous

Arthur B. Davies, one of the show's organizers, had only allotted him space for two paintings. In a fit of pique at Davies, he withdrew entirely from the exhibition.[14] Other artists in the Stieglitz circle kept their distance, especially after Weber told people that there were only three indisputably great modern painters: Cézanne, Rousseau, and himself. "Almost without exception, they found him obnoxious: opinionated, rude, intolerant."[15]

Success

In time, Weber's work found more adherents, including

expressionist
renderings of Jewish families, rabbis, and Talmudic scholars, than for the early modernist work he had abandoned circa 1920 and on which his current reputation is founded.

Not everyone believed that Weber fulfilled his early potential as he became a more representational and expressionist painter post-World War I. Critic Hilton Kramer wrote of him that, in light of the remarkable beginning of his career, "Weber proved instead to be one of the great disappointments of twentieth-century American art."[17] Others however, because of his bold "Cubist decade," hold him in the same high regard as other native modernists like John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth.

Poetry

While lecturing at the Clarence H. White School for Photography, Weber wrote his Cubist Poems that were to be published in 1914.[18] In 1926, the artist released another collection entitled "Primitives: Poems and Woodcuts." Weber designed the modernist-style binding for the book, as well as providing eleven

woodcuts for the illustrations.[18] First published by Spiral Press in a run of 350 copies, original editions are now rare.[19]

Cubes, cubes, cubes, cubes,
High, low and high, and higher, higher,
Far, far out, out, far..

Billions of things upon things
This for the eye, the eye of being,
At the edge of the Hudson,
Flowing timeless, endless,
On, on, on, on....
Excerpt from The Eye Moment, a Weber poem published in 1914[20]

Gallery

  • Portrait of Abraham Walkowitz, c. 1907
    Portrait of Abraham Walkowitz, c. 1907
  • Composition with Four Figures, 1910
    Composition with Four Figures, 1910
  • Standing Figure, 1911
    Standing Figure, 1911
  • Study for Russian Ballet, 1914
    Study for Russian Ballet, 1914
  • Avoirdupois, 1915
    Avoirdupois, 1915
  • Russian Ballet, 1916
    Russian Ballet, 1916
  • Sabbath, 1919
    Sabbath, 1919
  • The Visit, 1919, Brooklyn Museum
    The Visit, 1919, Brooklyn Museum

Collections

Collections containing Weber's work include:

Published works

  • Weber, Max (1914). Cubist Poems (2012, HardPress;
    ISBN 1407718533
    )
  • Weber, Max (1916). Essays on Art. William Edwin Rudge.
  • Weber, Max (1926). Primitives: Poems and Woodcuts. Spiral Press.

References

  1. ^ http://whitney.org/Collection/MaxWeber/31382 Archived 2014-11-04 at the Wayback Machine, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/13/arts/review-art-one-brief-and-shining-cubist-moment.html
  2. ^ Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 301. Berman reports that Juliana Force, the Whitney's first director who was responsible for the purchase in 1930, "was so pleased with the painting that she hung it in her drawing room, where it stayed until the museum opened."
  3. ^ Hunter, p. 83.
  4. ^ (fr)Dictionnaire de la peinture (Nouv. éd.)
  5. ^ Davidson, p. 29.
  6. ^ Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 65.
  7. ^ Brown, p. 43.
  8. ^ Arnold Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1963, p. 181.
  9. ^ Hunter, p. 85.
  10. ^ Max Weber, Retrospective Exhibition, 1907-1930: March 13-April 2, 1930, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Plandome Press. 1930. pp. 11, 30.
  11. ^ Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900 (New York: Praeger, 167), p. 43.
  12. ISBN 0-9851601-0-1
    .
  13. ISBN 978-0985160104. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )
  14. ^ Percy North, Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920, p. 35.
  15. ^ Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 150.
  16. ^ Jacobson, Aileen (May 4, 2012). "Pioneer's Landscapes in the Limelight: Max Weber's Long Island Landscapes Are at the Heckscher Museum". The New York Times. Retrieved April 7, 2013.
  17. ^ Hilton Kramer, "Despite Mentor Matisse, Weber Lost Early Magic," New York Observer, 2/1/99.
  18. ^ a b Julie L. Mellby (29 June 2012). "Max Weber, Cubist Poems". Princeton Education blogs. Retrieved 8 April 2013.
  19. ^ "Primitives: Poems and Woodcuts". Manhattan Rare Book Company. Retrieved 8 April 2013. [dead link]
  20. ^ Princeton education website

Sources

  • Brown, Milton. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
  • Davidson, Abraham A. Early American Modernist Painting, 1910-1935. New York: DaCapo, 1994.
  • Harnsberger, R.S. Four Artists of the Stieglitz Circle: A Sourcebook on Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber [Art Reference Collection, no. 26]. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
  • Hunter, Sam. Modern American Painting and Sculpture. New York: Dell, 1959.
  • North, Percy. Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991.
  • North, Percy. Max Weber: Max Weber's Women. New York: Forum Gallery, 1996.
  • Rubenstein, D.R. Max Weber: A Catalogue Raisonné of his Graphic Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
  • Werner, Abram. Max Weber. New York: Abrams, 1975.
  • Percy North, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Nancy Ireson, Pamela Roberts and Lionel Kelly. Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15. Lund Humphries, 2014.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Max Weber.


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